Wrap thy form in a mantle grey, Bind with thine hair the eyes of day, Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, When I arose and saw the dawn,. When light rode high, and the dew was gone, Thy brother, Death, came and cried, Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Death will come when thou art dead, Sleep will come when thou art fled; STANZAS, WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES. The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and sunny mountains wear The purple noon's transparent light; Around its unexpanded buds ; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City's voice itself is soft, like Solitude's. I see the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple sea-weeds strewn ; A line is obviously wanting here, which the Editor has overlooked. I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown ; The lightning of the noon-tide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. Alas! I have nor hope, nor health, Nor peace within, nor calm around, And walk'd with inward glory crown'd— Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are ; I could lie down like a tired child, Which I have borne and still must bear, My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Some might lament when I were cold, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. HEAVISIDE. My dear friend, Haselfoot, I must at once say that there are some passages in that review to me exceedingly objectionable. I hate as much as you can the truckling to a party-cry, but I demur to some of your assertions both on the score of principle and the score of prudence. VERNON. On the score of prudence I must have a voice potential." Ifthe article were not yours, Haselfoot, and, being yours, full of talent, and what is more full of honesty, I would at once reject it. But we must qualify it. SIR THOMAS. Never mix your liquor, my boys. If the man must dose the world with his brandy and gunpowder, why should you make a caudle of his concern, with your thin potations of water-gruel? HEAVISIDE. I quite agree with all you say about the powers of Shelley. It is the merest cowardice to deny his poetry to be fine because his politics are execrable; it is breaking down all the gradations of intellectual energy to say that because there is a wretched obliquity in his understanding upon the most awful subject of human thought, his poems partake of nothing but the passionate scepticism that fevered and maddened his soul. There are parts of his writings as pure as a Milton or a Wordsworth have conceived; and I quite agree with you, that he was not the poet of cold blooded doubts and heartless sensuality. But he was, nevertheless, a most dangerous writer-dangerous not immediately to the million, but mediately to the few who may operate in combination to make his errors produce their effect on the million. It is the union in Shelley of a lofty imagination, and a grovelling faith, that renders him so peculiarly obnoxious. The Quarterly Reviewer saw this; and, though whilst I say it I must at once disclaim any thing like a general approval of those personalities which are the disgrace of our literature, I must contend that in the instance of Shelley it was desirable to shew that such opinions neither made good or a happy man in their professor. There are parts in Shelley's life that supply the best antidote to his writings. HASELFOOT. a You have taken me by surprise, so that I may not be able to follow your argument, even if I were willing; but let me ask what is there in Shelley's life so peculiarly obnoxious? We are told that he was a man of flagitious character; but where is the evidence? VERNON. It pains me sincerely to speak it—but I speak advisedly and upon evidence, that Shelley was not a man of principle; he acted upon impulse, and not upon any settled determinations. That impulse led him to be extravagant in his generosity and callous in his discharge of the obligations of justice; (there are twenty good-natured men for one honest;) that impulse prompted him to marry a weak girl, (his first wife,) and then to abandon her under circumstances of the most reckless inhumanity. Who can forget her wretched self-destruction;-at once the proof of his flagitious disregard even of the obligations of nature, and of the VOL. III. PART 1. consequences of those notions which he had instilled into his un happy victim. HEAVISIDE. Once more I must beg to be understood, Haselfoot, that I quite agree in your admiration of Shelley's poetical power; he was a first-rate genius-such a genius as perhaps only arises as a phoenix; and most fervently do I utter the wish that gave birth to your conjecture, that he had been spared to see that change of mind which would have enabled "the troubled current of his opinions to have subsided into the calmness and depth of assured belief." But I contend that your admiration has carried you too far; that it has led you into the mistake of speaking so pas sionately of Shelley's beauties and so slightly of his enormous errors, (I know you feel these errors as much as I or any one,) so that some minds may be betrayed into a willing reception of his creed by such a description of the power of his general intellect, and find themselves imbued with all that can disorganize the moral and social world, before they are aware that they are reading sometimes the most pure, but sometimes the most unholy, thoughts, clothed in the most splendid imagery and the sweetest versification. HASELFOOT. Let me read the article to you again, and follow out your objections, step by step. Bah! SIR THOMAS. VERNON. We must come to a conclusion upon this point. Your article does credit to your head and your heart-but it is too zealous and enthusiastic;-it goes too much upon the common mistake that a suppression of peculiar opinions, and a conformity with established modes of thought, presuppose hypocrisy. It is the sin of such minds as Shelley that they choose to proclaim to mankind, with the courage of martyrs, all the pestilent crudities of their innumerable heresies. Whatever you may say, Shelley did avow himself an Atheist in Queen Mab, and if he recanted that profession in his later works, of which I am not quite sure, this is only another proof of the absolute necessity of not making a proclamation of sentiments to all mankind, which even the believer may, in a few years, as conscientiously abjure. HASELFOOT. Let me read the article again. I think I could SIR THOMAS. Bah!-Waiter, some brandy and soda-water. VERNON. Give us the article. We will print it with Heaviside's Commentary. SIR THOMAS. And write "poison" at the head of it-like prudent valets do with their infallible boot-top liquid. VERNON. Come; we must have no squabbling. Shelley's posthumous book is entitled to a generous admiration, such as Haselfoot has given it. It seems to have passed through the Liberal slough without carrying away much of its slime. The cockneys have been dabbling with the preface though. HAZELFOOT. The more pity. Mrs. Shelley has strength enough to do without the aid of all the cockneys in Christendom-be they in Cockaigne or Italy. But will the author of Frankenstein and Valperga do much for literature now that her "guide, philosopher, and friend," is gone? VERNON. I am not quite sure. By the by, I have in my pocket a clever scrap book of a dear brother, in which he has jotted down his off hand opinions of Mrs. Shelley's book-shall I read it? HEAVISIDE. By all means. The tintinnabulation of your voice is as favourable to slumber as "the drowsy tinklings to the distant folds." SIR THOMAS. Waiter! A jorum of Queen's ale and the stilton. I do not think I ever was so much disappointed in any book as in Valperga; I had the very highest expectations of the maturing of the genius which could produce such a work as Frankenstein. The faults of Frankenstein were occasional extravagance and over-writing;-it was, therefore, natural to suppose that the interval of between four and five years would correct this, without impairing its freshness, force, and vigour. But in Valperga there is not the slightest trace of the same hand-instead of the rapidity and enthusiastic energy which hurries you forward in Frankenstein, every thing is cold, crude, inconsecutive, and wearisome;not one flash of imagination, not one spark of passion-opening it as I did, with eager expectation, it must indeed have been bad for me after toiling a week to send the book back without having finished the first volume. This induced me to read Frankenstein again-for I thought I must have been strangely mistaken in my original judgment. So far, however, from this, a second reading has confirmed it. I think Frankenstein possesses extreme power, and displays capabilities such as I did hope would have produced far different things from Castruccio. The circumstances under which Frankenstein was written are well known; it is one of three tales agreed to be composed on |